Hundreds of Chicago factory workers who are fighting to keep their jobs in the US received a visit from Hillary Clinton on Monday, the day before a tightly contested Democratic primary in Illinois.

“It is imperative that we do more to keep jobs here, and we do more to attract jobs to places like Chicago, well, really across our country,” Clinton said after the meeting.

Last summer, Mondelēz International, the multinational food and beverages group and owner of Nabisco, announced that the company’s factory on Chicago’s South Side would be cutting 600 jobs and transferring production to new facilities in Monterrey and Salinas, Mexico. “I wanted to come by and talk with some of the workers and their representatives to ... figure out how we can stop this,” Clinton said.

According to the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ Union, who represent many of the plant’s employees, nearly 70% of the workers affected are black or Latino. The first of the workers to be laid off received notice in January, leaving others in the plant on edge fearing that they will be next.

“They don’t treat us like they used to treat us. They treat us like we’re nobody,” said Cristina Ramirez, a longtime employee in the factory. Ramirez said that many people in the plant feel like they are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. “We’re just going to keep doing the best we can do as long as we can,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez, who has worked at the South Side bakery for 32 years, is a third generation Nabisco employee, with her mother and grandmother both having worked at the factory going back over half a century. Ramirez’s grandmother emigrated to Chicago from Mexico before taking a job at the plant, looking for economic opportunity. Ramirez said the irony of those jobs now relocating back across the border left her “hurt and disappointed” but not surprised.

“My mother said it was going to happen, she said ‘mark my words’. If she was alive she would say ‘I told you so,’” Ramirez said.

The factory, which produces popular cookies like Oreos and Chips Ahoy, was built in the 1950s and once employed as many as 4,000 people. It is one of a dwindling number of unionized manufacturing sites still remaining in a community that has been decimated by half a century of deindustrialization and globalization. According to the Bureau of Labor, Chicago lost 1.3% of its manufacturing jobs between August 2014 and August 2015, a time period when manufacturing was up by 0.9% across the US. About 1,000 employees remained at the Mondelēz plant before the cuts were announced.

This isn’t the first time Clinton has taken an interest in the company’s labor practices. At a campaign event in Detroit earlier this month Clinton said: “If a company like Nabisco outsources and ships jobs overseas, we’ll make you give back the tax breaks you receive here in America.”

On Monday she said: “This particular plant has received, over the years, tax benefits and investments from the taxpayers of Chicago and Illinois in order to expand the production lines ... I think they should have to pay that money back and that that money would be used to reinvest in the community and the workers.”

She added: “I know we can bring jobs and create jobs right here. I believe if we change the incentives in our tax code to recruit jobs here and we penalize those companies that are shipping jobs out, especially if they have received government money from you and me.”

The company has repeatedly applied for tax incentives for creating and maintaining jobs in the region. Most recently, it signed a contract in 2013 for an “Economic Development for a Growing Economy” or EDGE grant from the state which agreed to offer the company tax credits towards a $35m investment in Mondelēz’s Naperville plant on the projection that it would create 25 jobs. A Chicago Tribune investigation found those jobs never came to be, and Mondelēz ultimately did not claim or receive the credit.

Clinton is not the only presidential candidate who has picked up the cause of the beleaguered Nabisco factory workers. In August, fellow frontrunner Donald Trump declared that he would never eat Oreo cookies again to protest the company’s decision to ship jobs overseas to cut costs, even though it is a practice Trump has engaged in repeatedly as the founder of dozens of eponymous brands. Trump incorrectly claimed that the factory was being closed in that speech, a claim the company denies.

“The Chicago bakery continues to remain open continues to be important and we as a company remain committed to the United States,” said Laurie Guzzinati, a company spokeswoman. “We are a global business and we continue to invest in all of the regions where we have business operations.”

It remains to be seen if either Trump or Clinton can translate their outrage for Chicago workers into a primary victory in Illinois. Despite having to cancel a Chicago rally on Friday over safety concerns, Trump still leads his GOP rivals in Illinois according to a recent CBS News poll. The same poll shows Clinton trailing challenger Bernie Sanders in Illinois by two points.

The BCTGM union does not offer formal endorsements, but international vice president Jethro Head said “Hillary’s got a lot of votes coming out of Illinios. The workers were happy to see her and she’s fighting on their behalf.”